Thousand Dying Suns

Psionic Blue Shit and Cyberpunk street brawls

KindleNomicon Audio+Text entry - Thorne

So, fuck… so It’s been a long while since we felt this close to death. A certain arrogance comes from believing oneself is on “the correct path.” It’s a thing we’ve always envied in the religious. It feels very uncomfortable to recognize it in ourselves. It took staring our death in the face, in the form of a terrifying cyborg samurai woman, to realize that just because we feel buoyed by the “will” of the multiverse doesn’t mean we can’t be casually murdered. Free will behind guns and swords is a bitch.

So we’ve found out that the blue glowy stone that Marva “discovered” has exciting properties. After carter handled it, it “phased” through a table. Luckily not through the hull of the venture. We hypothesize that it took on some of his properties? It also serves to enhance Khiron’s psionics. It doesn’t do fuck-all for us, but we suppose that’s fair. Not everything is magic. We slightly understand how Carter feels when we accomplish these amazing things with magic and they don’t even register for him. After all these discoveries it is casually mentioned that they saw a whole sarcophagus(!) of the stuff waiting to be loaded into a train, guarded by scary church knights. This while everyone is hemming and hawing over what to do next, which didn’t include the sarcophagus. Fuck, lets do that then?!

So, we found a burly fellow who worked at the station, Gwolp, and applied the sort of pressure we’re best at. We didn’t need to take things as far as we did with him. There was no reason to share with him the full range of our talents, but once we get going, the tendency is to take things as far as they’ll go, and he was a much better partner than we might have guessed. A very open minded fellow, with stamina and self-control. He was in a daze after, very pliant and open to suggestion, but we feared he might protest a bit too much when we made our inevitable exit. Sadly, we never got the chance to find out.

sharp intake of breath and a pause

Gwolp led us to the office where the shipping manifests were filed and just as we were making a copy, some stealthy villain turned his fucking head into a meat canoe with a very non-Valis future gun. We ran, diving behind the copier and then worm-holing through the wall. We didn’t have time to close it after we’d passed through and a monstous woman followed – about 7 feet tall and gaunt, with scary tech hanging off her and a cyberpunk trench coat. So we fought back, lashing out with the considerable force of our mental strength. She was unphased and she actually fucking shot us! More than once. It’s been a long time since that happened.

Our psychic assault having failed, we opted for one of the classics. Fire! More fire than we’ve ever created. It blotted out the alley and the tram-way overhead, it nearly blinded us with it’s brilliance. But somehow, the amazing cyber-cunt dodged it; dodged an entire alley full of fucking magical fire. Fuck. Unfortunately, the explosives her crew had placed inside the office nearby did not have her movie-ninja knack for impossible acrobatics, so they promptly blew the fuck up.

Say what you will about the Thorne siblings, we know when we’re beaten. So we teleported the fuck away from that madness, back to the hotel room and our waiting companions. Everyone except Carter, who had been attempting to rescue us when the building blew up. We hate to admit it, but we’re starting to like him a bit. He’s pretty good at this captain thing (although, we’ll certainly take the credit for causing that to happen) and he didn’t have to come after us. For future, we shall have to be a bit more particular about the contingency plan, although who knew they would be trying to blow up the building we were trying to steal records from? Happy news though, he didn’t die! All the bitch-thugs did, though, so that’s something. We patched him up, and ourselves, and that was the end of a shit day.

Oh, did we mention? The original manifest and our copy were blown up in the fire. However, we did get a good look at it beforehand and we discovered that the blue shit came from a place called Kolono and was being shipped to Port Horwald. Oh, and it was being guarded by knights from the church.

So we sort of ran out both ends. We started with Port Horwald because it was closer, but we didn’t find a lot out. Only that the file that should have listed who had taken posession of the goods was missing, the whole day was, in fact. A So we elected to try the point of Origin, Kolono. It turned out that Kolono wasn’t exactly a tourist destination. A fact made evident by its absence on any of our maps. We eventually located a cartography enthusiast who knew of it, and pointed us in the direction of a place called “Dog Itch.” So we set out. On the way, more and more folk got off the train until we were essentially the only passengers. The conductor questioned our destination, suggesting that we were ill equipped for dog itch and it’s surrounding desert. We needed water recycling suits and the like. So we made the decision to travel on to Yellowtail. The nearest city with an economy robust enough to actually exchange goods and services for currency. On the way there, we noticed a vast explosion in the distance. Venture confirmed the site of the explosion as the mine at Kolono. Fuck.

So, what do we have? A shipment of psionically active blue shit being hauled out of the earth at Kolono. The only reason we’re aware of it at all is because Marva, who is missing, found a chunk of it herself and then we happened to see some of it at the station. Then it was shipped across the planet to the spaceport and all points of record along the way are destroyed or removed. Oh, and the church is involved. So, this is a cover-up, and it’s big and important and we need to figure it out and take it away from the church before they use it for something nefarious.

The black helicopter headed to a place called Fort Loyd. So it seems like that’s where we’re going next.